Elizabeth Hanson and Jenae Kirby, instructors at Shoreline Community College, have co-authored a textbook for use by faculty and students, designed for students who speak English as a second language who are beginning their healthcare career training. Take a look at this free, online textbook: On-Ramp to Nursing Assistant Certified.

From the Lulu site description of the text:
Prepare your high beginning level/intermediate level ESL students for entrance into a regular nursing assistant program or for entrance into a general health care career training program. Each of the 6 units includes 3 readings, vocabulary development, writing and grammar instruction and practice. This course is based on authentic nursing assistant course materials. Topics include: health problems, duties of a Nursing Assistant, places to work in health care, and the infectious disease chain. This is a great starting point for students and ESL teachers.

Thanks, Elizabeth and Jenae, for sharing your expertise with the world!

Please take a look at the newly-launched Campus Safety and Security page, now residing on the home page of the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) website.

The page includes links to each of our 34 college's own Campus Safety pages. The purpose of the site is to provide access to campus safety efforts, crime statistics, and contact information for campus security staff.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Bb made a few unexpected decisions this week, including the decision to continue their support for ANGEL, "indefinitely." What does that mean for all of us in Washington who are currently using ANGEL, but were faced with support ending in 2014? Too soon to know.

In a surprise move education software giant Blackboard Inc. acquires Moodlerooms, the largest north american provider of Moodle services, adds Sakai inventor to leadership team and launches open source services to provide scalable capabilities to the Higher Education Marketplace.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

ctcLink...a major project in the Washington State Community and Technical College System...mentioned in lots of meetings...important enough to still have funding...but what the heck is it?

ctcLink is a new technology foundation that will replace an outdated 30-year-old computer system with modern services--available anytime, anywhere--for the students, faculty and staff of Washington's community and technical colleges.
See the fact sheet on this page for a brief overview of ctcLink or get even more details in this set of Frequently Asked Questions.

8 Qualities of Remarkable Employees

Forget good to great. Here's what makes a great employee remarkable.

By Jeff Haden | Feb 21, 2012

Great employees are reliable, dependable, proactive, diligent, great leaders and great followers... they possess a wide range of easily-defined—but hard to find—qualities.A few hit the next level. Some employees are remarkable, possessing qualities that may not appear on performance appraisals but nonetheless make a major impact on performance.Read the full story...

One-fourth of the college students surveyed said they owned a tablet, compared with just 7 percent last year. Sixty-three percent of college students believe tablets will replace textbooks in the next five years—a 15 percent increase over last year’s survey. More than a third said they intended to buy a tablet sometime in the next six months.

From its launch nine years ago, The Academy for College Excellence has invested in rigorous, third-party evaluation to study the impact of its learning solutions. We are now engaged in our third longitudinal student outcomes study, to assess the effect of the ACE learning model on attitudes and behaviors, as well as the academic outcomes, of students across the six community colleges who are participating in a semester of ACE-designed programming. MPR Associates, our research partner, has completed the first preliminary report on this study which describes promising findings.

Measuring psychosocial (or affective) vulnerabilities at three different measurement times (before entering the ACE Program, following the two week Foundation Course and then at the end of the first semester), MPR reports that ACE's first semester model has a statistically valid positive impact on all eight factors measured. Results thus far show that students that complete the first semester report a marked improvement in eight affective dimensions: self-efficacy, teamwork, identity, interaction, mindfulness, describing, accepting, and observing. The report also outlines findings from a survey given to students who participated in the ACE Bridge Semester. These students report changes in behaviors such as paying attention, completing assignments, and being prepared and organized. They also reported changes in their interactions with others. These results can be attributed to the camaraderie and cohesiveness that is carefully developed and facilitated through the ACE curriculum and model.

By studying shifts in attitude and behavior along with academic outcomes, ACE is adding to the growing body of research showing that personal growth and development in students is critically important to academic, personal, and professional success. Several additional reports measuring student academic performance outcomes in this longitudinal study are forthcoming. You can review the preliminary report in full at http://academyforcollegeexcellence.org/why-ace/
, as well as the many other studies on ACE learning solutions.

Change, THE MAGAZINE OF HIGHER LEARNING published an article called "Supporting the Students of the Future" by Diego Navarro, the Director of the Academy for College Excellence -- in its January/February 2012 issue. In his article, Diego describes the model developed by ACE to identify and understand vulnerable students and to provide interventions that meet the needs of these under-prepared students from diverse backgrounds.

Diego will be conducting a new series of free webinars further exploring the ideas he outlined in the article; to learn about the webinar, go to www.my-ace.org/change-webinar. The next one will take place on March 23, 2012, register here.

ACE has gained extensive experience and developed strategies that can help community colleges identify the ways that they currently work with vulnerable students, assess their existing approaches, and support changes to increase effectiveness with these students. To learn more about the latest strategies, go to www.my-ace.org/learn-more-about-cssas/

Washington State Faculty Workshop

Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington hosted a two-day faculty experiential learning workshop in January, led by Diego Navarro. The event sold out with 55 attendees from six Seattle area community colleges, school districts and the state board. Diego shared ACE's signature experiential communication tools, helping participants improve their communication and leadership skills and providing a deeper understanding of the experiential education methodology that is the basis of the ACE curriculum.

After two full and intense days over a dozen attendees stayed late to share ideas and support each other in bringing a FELI (Faculty Experiential Learning Institute) event to their colleges. FELIs are now being planned at three colleges in Washington State this summer. ACE has also been asked to provide similar professional development workshops in other areas of the country for faculty desiring new ways to connect and work with students and each other.

"All of the communication work will be of immediate value in my work life. This is information that has the power to transform our ability to help students succeed. Overall a successful 2 days. " -From a participant

Monday, March 12, 2012

Editorial: Washington’s new Student Achievement Council promising for higher ed

Legislation awaiting Gov. Chris Gregoire's signature replaces the citizens board with a stronger and more focused entity. The new Student Achievement Council promises more vocal and robust leadership to design a higher-education system closely aligned with work force and educational needs.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Please enjoy this final edition of the SBCTC Legislative News for the regular 2012 session.If you see last week’s edition, refresh your browser [F5].

Take the next two days off. And if there is budget progress or other news related to Washington’s community and technical colleges, we will bring you updates in occasional special session editions of Legislative News.

At the winter 2012 Assessment, Teaching and Learning Retreat faculty and faculty development leaders created the Educators' Open Licensing Pledge, which reads:

"We, as educators employed by schools, colleges, and universities, pledge to honor the spirit of the Open Educational Resources Movement by designating the materials we create at our institutions with a Creative Commons License." Please join us in our commitment to openly sharing educational materials, by adding your name to the pledge: http://bit.ly/openedpledge

This affordableone-day training is presented by State Board for Community and Technical Colleges professionals, Noreen Light and John Boesenberg.

You may participate in the SBCTC/Legislative Module alone or as part of the four Leading from the Middle modules (Professional Development, Budget and Finance, and Human Recourses) which will be offered quarterly in your region.

Fee for individuals is $90.00 per module – includes coffee and lunch

This comprehensive training is intended for CTC employees who are:

*new to a leadership position

*new to the Washington CTC system

*making a transition from faculty to exempt position

*have never had training for a leadership position

*any community or technical college employee wanted to expand their knowledge

The research studies referenced in this news article from Inside Higher ED (and another article in the New York Times) reinforce the case that multiple measures, including indicators related to HS performance, are more useful than a single standardized test score. We’re already talking about those issues as part of our system efficiency work, but of course the capacity challenges we face make taking that kind of approach daunting at best. One encouraging possibility on the horizon, at least for students coming into our colleges more or less straight from high school, is the potential of using the new Smarter Balanced 11th-grade assessment, currently in development, in conjunction with HS course-taking (transcript information) and perhaps GPA in lieu of the current placement tests. This tool will be a college-readiness assessment for math and English Language Arts based on the Common Core State Standards, and we have the opportunity through our new Core to College project to explore whether or not the standards and the assessment will in fact be useful to us in this process. We’ll be starting this work in the spring and hope to engage a number of faculty and colleges in the work that runs between now and December 2014; I’ll post more details very soon on how to get involved!

Monday, March 5, 2012

Today Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Institute launch the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition. The competition will award cash prizes, provided by the Open Society Institute, of up to $25,000 for the best short videos that explain the use and promise of free, high-quality open educational resources and describe the benefits and opportunities these materials create for teachers, students and schools.

The Why Open Education Matters Video Competition coincides with the first annual Open Education Week. Open Ed Week is a global event that seeks to raise awareness about the benefits of free and open sharing in education. While Open Educational Resources have been around for 10 years now, the benefits and promise of a the global Open Education movement needs to be known to all. We need your help.

We're honored to have U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan provide the introduction to the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition. Your videos must be submitted to the competition website by June 5, 2012, and winners will be announced July 18, 2012. Cash prizes include $25,000 (first), $5,000 (second), and $1,000 (Public Choice Award). Judges include Davis Guggenheim, Nina Paley, James Franco, and many others. We can't wait to see your creative videos.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

A February 2012 report by the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment, The For-Profit Postsecondary School Sector: Nimble Critters or Agile Predators?, uses the 2004 to 2009 Beginning Postsecondary Students (BPS) longitudinal survey to assess a recent cohort of first-time undergraduates who attended for-profits relative to comparable students who attended community colleges or other public or private non-profit institutions. The report depicts the value of for-profits to certain students, and indicates that for-profit schools do better in terms of first-year retention and the completion of shorter certificate and degree programs. However, the data also show that first-time postsecondary students at for-profits wind up with higher debt burdens, experience greater unemployment after leaving school, have modestly lower earnings six years after starting college and end up with higher student loan default rates than do observationally-similar students from public and non-profit institutions.